HowTo: Install Ghostscript on MediaTemple

This is a repost of my original writeup over on Shamus Writes.

I thought I’d go ahead and describe the process for installing Ghostscript on a MediaTemple (dv) server, especially since I’ve already got one reader who would like to see it.

Use your favorite shell client to log on to your (mt) account as root. I use PuTTY Portable from the “portableapps.com”:http://portableapps.com website. At the command line typ:

cd /usr

Type:

wget http://ghostscript.com/releases/ghostscript-8.63.tar.gz

Once the file is done downloading, type:

tar -xvf ghostscript-8.63.tar.gz

Once _that’s_ done, type:

cd ghostscript-8.63

Type:

./configure

which will run for a moment and display a long list of output. Once you have the command line back, type:

make

which will take a bit longer to run than the configure command. Again, once you have the command line back, type:

make install

which will actually install Ghostscript on your server. Provided everything went well and no error messages showed up at any step along the way, you should now have Ghostscript installed. The default location for Ghostscript is:

/usr/local/bin/gs

Typing:

which gs

in the command line will confirm this. If you want to do cleanup, just move back up a directory to

/usr

and type :

rm ghostscript-8.63.tar.gz

rm -vrf ghostscript-8.63

From there, just configure whatever script you want to run with ImageMagick and Ghostscript according to said script’s specifications and have fun!